Video: Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is well under way and could have an impact even greater than the Web that we all use every day, predicts Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium and senior researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. (See “A Smarter Web.”) Berners-Lee says (in this video) that the Semantic Web, which he describes as a “web of data” in contrast to today’s “web of documents,” has great potential in giving a user the ability to see, understand, and manipulate data. He points to applications in medicine, in reacting to civil and health emergencies, and even in such mundane tasks as knowing where your friends are in relation to the nearest coffee shop.